Need some help with healing in PVP. (feast)
Definitely not the best healer in pvp and i'm looking for some pointers to improve. I ran as an AST and have had some trouble surviving I know the basics of kite around cause in pvp were pretty much tanks. But i'm starting to see when I get constantly stun locked I start relying on aspected benefic to keep myself alive since it's an instant cast. However in my latest face roll though the feast the tank kept yelling at me to use benefic 2 which I can understand does much more healing wise but not quiet sure how to use that when i'm being chased by a mnk and a pld and lightspeed on cool down. not sure if maybe i'm missing something or perhaps I just suck because this too could be a valid answer which i'm willing to accept. If anyone could give me some pointers i'd be forever in your debt.
Posted Jul 25, 2016, 5:08 PM UTC
I play shield stance AST in PVP. I have approx 1500 games played and an approx 50% win rate. Last season I went to Gold rank before I quit playing for the rest of the season.
Healing in PVP is likely the hardest role. It relies on you being able to pre-emptively predict where people are going to put their damage and cover for it accordingly. AST is a strong single target healer, but you have to make sure you're pointing your heals in the right place or people will drop. You can misjudge 1GCD and that will be the game losing misplay. Try to look who people are near and where you think the damage is going to be.
Firstly: Forget people who are jerks to you. It happens. Sometimes you have a bad game. Sometimes you misplay. Sometimes the other team have insane burst that you cannot hope to heal because every GCD you attempt is interrupted. And sometimes, your team do not work with you at all. People will be people and you can't change them or make them see it your way. Remember: they will have to live the rest of their lives with being the kinds of people who become cruel when there is no accountability for their actions.
Now the AST stuff: Aspected Benefic is very weak in comparision to Benefic 2. It's not an appropriate thing to use repeatedly and spamming it is not going to keep you alive. You need to get Benefic 2 off on yourself. Aspected Benefic is mostly useful for a cast when you are re-positioning, or pre-emptively shielding team mates against Limit Break etc. It's a myth that AST is an easy class to heal in because "you just shield spam".
You can wear items as low as i150 (HQ) because Feast is level synced. I personally prefer a SS and Piety build. I have 1 VIT accessory (it's the Asuran Fending Earring, iirc, it's got Vit and crit+det, so it's the most useful fending accessory for you.) You can wear more if you want but I prefer not to.
Using Focus Target on whoever you perceive as the most threatening target can be useful, but be aware this often does not actually show up when people use damage buffs. You should also try to LOS people, especially the ranged, but not at the expense of your own teams' LOS.
Macros:
Have a macro for removing Attunement early.
Have a macro for Purifying yourself without targetting yourself.
Have a macro to alert your team to your MP.
Have a macro requesting Sleep purification.
Always be casting!
A good opener looks something like this: Before your opener, you can try to spam Benefic 1 onto yourself or team mates to proc yourself an extra instant cast Bene 2. You should also try to get an enhanced Spear or Arrow for yourself. Bole is also great because it helps you avoid interrupts. Don't bother buffing your team mates - your cards are very strong for enhancing your own play, and you really need to trust that someone has high damage to "nerf" your own opener. Ofc, sometimes RNG does the nerfing for you :D
If you're getting attacked yourself by just the tank (this is common), Lightspeed and use Celestial Opposition to stun your opponents and give you extra Lightspeed GCDs. You can use Purify on the first Stun you receive. Blizzard2 and run is a good way to mitigate and remove damage from the equation, but be careful about whether you can risk losing the heal. You can use Synastry to heal yourself and someone else, albeit somewhat weakly.
If you're not getting attacked yourself, don't use Lightspeed until you are. Remember, Lightspeed moves the healing done to the beginning of the GCD, but it doesn't actually speed up your GCDs. It's much better to have it to allow yourself to instacast when you're taking damage yourself. Swiftcast the first GCD, then Synastry spam and use ED when they're low. (Remember, ED is stronger when the target has less HP, so the correct play is always to use ED and then a heal)
If you're being attacked by everybody, use Attunement. You can do this to absorb the majority of their buffed attacks, then pop out and use ED+Lightspeed and cover the healing as best you can. In these cases, you basically have to hope that your DPS can remove someone from the event before your buffs run out. If you're stunned, you need to use Purify and ED before they can do enough damage to kill you. Try not to use Attunement when you don't have any tricks up your sleeve afterwards, ie. you really want to use Attunement to cover the wait for ED to come back. It's also not a good idea to use Attunement below about 70% health when you're being bursted. It has a long animation and you will take another GCD from everybody whilst it's firing, and you'll not be receiving any heals from yourself to counter these, either.
You should use Bene 2 all through the opener, you can recover MP later with Mana Draw. Try to use Mana Draw as early as possible, as soon as it will be valuable, and getting a Spear on it is very useful, too.
If you're being focused and you have arrow, you can pair this with Aetheric Burst to make your GCDs much faster than the enemy teams. This makes it very easy to avoid interrupts.
When you don't have your buffs: The enemy team also tend not to have theirs, so it's harder for them to interrupt you. If you're being focussed, Equanamity (or whatever it is) is extremely valuable in staying alive, because it allows you to get off every heal. It's also worth using Disable on a warrior who seems like he's about to Fell Cleave you.
Don't forget about things like your bubble regen: this can be extremely valuable, but applying it in the middle of combat can lose you too much time, so it's better applied pre-emptively or when you're on top. Focalization and Retrogradation are nice skills to help mitigate strong openers.
Hope this helped, just a few of my thoughts anyway :D
Piggy backing here. If you are playing AST, Crit/PIE is what I would recommend. With abilities like Lightspeed, Essential Dignity, and Aspected Benefic, SS is a wasted stat in most situations. It's good for benefic 2 spam, or getting off Blizz 2's, but that's about it.
Also, the bit about Aspected Benefic vs Benefic 2 is very vague. In many situations, you will need to rely on AB because it is too dangerous to potentially waste precious seconds on trying to get a cast off(Think: Can this be interrupted? Would my target die if it gets interrupted?) 9/10 times, it is better to try to spam AB and pray than to try to cast B2 and fail. That said, it is very important you don't just spam AB exclusively. (Using spells like "Surecast" and "Equinimity" can help out with safe B2 casting.)
Also: Even though you shouldn't let the flamers "get to you", you really should ask yourself after each match "how can i improve?" 9/10 times, if someone is flaming you, even as a healer, they are probably right. You were probably bad, you probably lost your team the match, you probably could have done some sort of combinations of GCDs and OGCDs in a better order to not have lost. Then there's that 1/10 time where the 20k damage ninja yells at you for letting him die because he ran into the enemies spawn with blood for blood on. Fuck that guy.
Hello o/ Thanks for the reply, this is very interesting for me to read. My thoughts:
Yeah, you're right. It was pretty hard to cram everything I wanted to say into the one wall of text. Aspected Benefic can have some really interesting uses. Using it to shield yourself so you know your next Bene 2 will fire, or using it because you're pretty sure it's the only heal you're going to have time to do, using it because you have to be moving right now. I do however think that any extended use of AB will result in the target dying, (ie. more than 2 in a row during damage, basically) especially if the other team is buffed. I use it if I think "this guy needs a heal at the beginning of this GCD or he's gonna die" or "I'm not going to get any other chance to heal but the beginning of this GCD."
I don't find SS a wasted stat. Crit is very nice and I actually used to stack crit/pie but I don't feel that you gain enough consistency from crit for it to be valuable, whereas SS is applied to every single thing you do. IMO a shortened GCD is really strong in PVP because it helps prevent those "Ah, if only my cast landed slightly quicker...." moments. A good crit can save a life though, so I certainly do feel that crit is good. I am just not sure if the random aspect of crit is worth investing in a pretty bursty scenario, since it is unreliable.
Also re. flaming: I automatically always critique myself because it's how I've always improved in this game, both in PVP and PVE. I'm certainly not perfect and I never claim to be, which is mostly why I provided my win rate which is not particularly high. Every single time I make a mistake (or die), I think "Oh, was it a misplay? How could I have changed my play in order to prevent that?" - and I usually decide on something new to try, or what I should have done. The answer to a lot of these questions is "react better/quicker", as I personally find that the opener/most bursty part of a game is the hardest part to heal. I will never need prompting to attempt to improve, since improvement is my ultimate goal in this game. Whilst I am literally always happy to hear people's advice and ideas, even from those I find unlikeable as people, I've never found verbal abuse a learning experience. I'm not talking about the guy who tells you "Did you consider doing it this way?" or "Why didn't you do this?". I also think that people who don't play healer have a difficult time understanding the factors that lead to failure and so you have to use your own experiences to judge the validity of their advice. For example, some people tend not to give that much thought to things like LOS and using their own defensive CDs. A DPS who uses their self heals is very noticeable compared to one who does not, a BRD/MCH who uses the PVP MP skill is very noticeable compared to one who does not, those who run back to spawn on healer death are noticeable vs. those who do not, DPS who do not deal great burst damage etc. I had my friend watch my play on a stream to give me advice, and it was really useful to hear his thoughts on some small-ish things like that which I would not normally have always had the time to notice. It's not about avoiding responsibility or blame, but really just considering all factors in place.
Interesting I didnt think about combining arrow with aetheric burst. To add on to what you said celestial opposition increases the time on sprint as well. I usually save swiftcast for blizz 2 its my get out of jail free card. Also using stella to put heavy on targets is amazing especially at the beginning or when you have down time. I generally use crit and pie build on my ast but im starting to think pie and ss might be better. Anytime I try to constantly cast benefict 2 in noct its risky without arrow. But if the team you are facing has smn you dont use noct right? I find the healing down and virus can make the shields weak.
I have very little experience healing with Diurnal in PVP, so I'm pretty "ehh.." about swapping. I find that I receive interrupts much more often due to the lack of shields and struggle to play around that. So... I don't know if I would try Diurnal, even vs. SMN.
ah those are great! i hadn't thought of that!